Haunted Mansion
**This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
I don’t remember much of the Eddie Murphy-starring “Haunted Mansion” from 2003, but I do remember it being a decent family movie. It certainly was not something where doing a new version felt wrong, but having a new adaptation of the theme park ride 20 years after that film is still surprising. Even more surprising is that Justin Simien’s film engaged me with characters and a story I cared about, but delivered visual effects that made this film feel like a theme park ride, as well. We’re used to that last part not seeming like a compliment for a movie, but given that the film’s origin is an attraction at Disney parks, it seems fitting.
The film begins- seemingly- on New Year’s Eve in New Orleans. Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) is at a bar and meets Alyssa (Charity Jordan), and the two hit it off. He is an astrophysicist, and she is someone interested in the supernatural. An undetermined amount of time later, and Ben- drunk, depressed- is giving walking tours of the city; something happened with Alyssa to get him to this point. At the same time, a mother and her son (Rosario Dawson and Chase Dillon) are moving into a mansion just outside of New Orleans, which they soon find out is haunted. A priest (Owen Wilson) is enlisted, and he turns to Ben, who was working on a camera that could capture the supernatural. What happens when the supernatural captures them, however?
Re-reading about the Murphy film, it seems to fit in with the basic structure of an overworked parent that Eddie Murphy’s family comedies leaned into at that time. One of the things I like about the way Simien and writer Katie Dippold find their way into this is how the supernatural, and the idea of loss and grief, drives the characters, and the way they interact with the occurrences in this film. Dippold was a co-writer on the unfairly-maligned “Ghostbusters” film from 2016, and I definitely could tell some carry-over in the sensibilities to how each film approached combining fright and funny. Here, I love how each character’s past and present- including Tiffany Haddish as a psychic and Danny DeVito as a professor who studies haunted houses- plays a part in the larger way they interact with the phenomenon happening in the mansion. At the center of it is Ben, and Stanfield gives a genuinely terrific performance as a character who felt rejuvenated by love and purpose, and had that taken away. Originally skeptical of what Gabbie and Tyler (Dawson and Dillon’s characters) and Kent (Wilson’s character) are saying, Ben is won over, and forced to engage with some feelings he hadn’t felt in a long time. All of the actors have their moments, but Stanfield is the heart of this movie.
“Haunted Mansion” is not overly serious, however, and it still has plenty of fun. In addition to “Ghostbusters” I also felt a bit of a “Frighteners” vibe in the way it presented the Ghost Realm, in particular. It doesn’t go all the way into R-rated humor and violence, but the visual effects do carry weight to them that was pleasantly surprising. That is especially helpful as the film is hurtling into Act 3, when many of the mysteries have been discovered, and the spectacle of the film takes over- Simien (“Dear White People,” “Bad Hair”) gives us an extravaganza that has stakes, even if we feel like we know where it’s going. (Because we already do.) This film was originally scheduled for October in theatres, but having seen it, Disney made the right call- this way, they can try and turn this into a summer sleeper while also getting strong streaming numbers in October, and on Halloween. The reason that’s possible, though, is that they allowed the filmmakers to make a film that didn’t just play it by the numbers, and turn out one of the most surprising films of the summer.
